Great Thoughts Time

You've likely heard or read about Google's famous of '20% time', their practice that allows and even encourages Google engineers to spend as much as 20% of their working hours pursuing projects of their own creation and choice. Google's history and some part of their culture is shaped by this unusual convention, most organizations would be hard pressed to define roles and manage teams and project commitments if a large part of their workforce was simply 'given' one day a week to do as they pleased.The Hamming Distance

Certainly Google has benefited from this practice as much if not more than the individual engineers. Many successful projects, (Gmail being the most well known), are said to have gotten their start as '20% time' projects. But despite how well known Google's program is, the clear successes it has helped to produce, and the seemingly obvious talent attraction and retention benefits that such freedom, (and trust), must accrue to Google; this program has not seen widespread adoption outside Google. 

So while the actual practice of formal '20% time' is more or less a Google-specific program, the idea of taking some time to step back from the day-to-day grind and think about new projects or tricky problems that may or may not be related to current initiatives is not at all unique. But the problem for most of us that have to try and find available time or seek opportunity for similar consistent stretches of exploration is that well, we just never find the time. Or we only find the time when we should be doing something else. Like actually having a life outside of work, taking a vacation, or participating in family or community activities.

I was thinking about this over the weekend when I came across the transcript of a talk titled 'You and Your Research' given by the late mathematician Dr. Richard Hamming on March 7, 1986 to an audience at the legendary Bell Laboratories facility in New Jersey. The hour or so long talk covered a fairly wide range of topics and bits of advice from the then 71 year-old Hamming, but none more interesting than his description of his personal version of '20% time', something he called 'Great Thoughts Time.'  What is 'Great Thoughts Time?' From the written transcript of Hamming's talk:

If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea. Along those lines at some urging from John Tukey and others, I finally adopted what I called 'Great Thoughts Time.' When I went to lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: `What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?', `How will computers change science?''

Very cool. Hamming invented his own version of '20% Time' sometime in the 1950s, except it was really just '10% Time', (from 'Friday noon' onward), and rather than an open and free-flowing kind of exercise, he concentrated his thinking on what he called 'Great Thoughts', those critical and truly important ideas that if he focused on them, he could do great work. If you read the entire transcript of Hamming's talk you get the sense of the competitiveness inherent amongst these super intelligent scientists at Bell Labs.

Hamming clearly believed that having the smarts alone would not guarantee a scientist, or anyone for that matter a shot at real greatness. To do great work you had to work on only the truly important problems. And to identify what those truly important problems were, you had to set aside a block in your schedule for 'Great Thoughts Time'.

What do you think? Do you set aside time to think about the biggest issues facing you, your profession, or your organization today?

Why not?

Comments

[Naomi Bloom]

The answer would be yes. Professionally, the annual update cycle for my HRM domain model and architectural "starter kits" is a forced period of sifting through a year's worth of notes/articles/blog posts/etc., contemplating the implications of all of this for the "starter kits," and then making first the thematic/cross-cutting updates followed by the picky little detailed ones. Personally, the period between Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur, the "days of awe," is when I do a full review of the year past and the one to come, resolving outstanding interpersonal issues as best I can, clearing the underbrush that accumulates in all our lives, determining what changes I need to make in my own behavior/priorities/goals/etc. and in my relationships with others, and deciding on what's important for the coming year. It's a time of reflection and renewal, a time to think the great thoughts about life, the universe and everything. Here's more on this process of renewal http://infullbloom.us/?p=2453

[shana]

The idea of 20% time is great and I think that we all wish that we had that kind of time in our jobs to sit back and think deep thoughts. The running joke when I was at Google was that it should have been called 120% time since it was often what you did after you got 100% of your work done. As with all things, the truth is somewhere between the policy and the rumor.

It also interestingly only applied to the engineering department (except in rare cases). The idea of 20% time was typically not part of life for HR, Sales, Marketing, etc. Additionally, I noticed that Dr. Hamming also comes from a strongly technical background. The thought that comes to mind in reading this is whether or not non-technical positions benefit as much from 20% time as those in technical positions. And adding on to that, why do corporations seem to only feel that the technical side of the business needs this free time? (There's a research idea for some PhD out there)

[Steve]

Naomi - Thanks for sharing your process, obviously it has worked fabulously for you and has some lessons for us all.

Shana - Thanks for sharing some insight into the 20% time as it plays out. I had heard the '120% time' description somewhere as well. Very good question about whether or not, (or maybe why or why not), that this kind of dedicated time to 'think big thoughts' seems to be more prevalent in the technical arena. I think I will mull it over for a future post for sure.

[Saurabh Hooda]

Great Thoughts time is most utilized time ever. One should include this as a routine by adding time for that in calendar every week else it will be forgotten with time.